A streamlined air travel experience: your face as your ID

10

October

2022

5/5 (1)

Our fingerprints, irises and facial features are all characteristics that are unique to ourselves, making it the perfect form of evidence to prove your identity. In the past decade, the use of biometrics in the airport industry has therefore also skyrocketed (OAG, 2022). It allows for faster processing of travelers at border control and in the boarding process. Facial recognition can speed up the process by 2 times (Paterson, 2022). It makes travel more secure, as it can be confirmed with certainty that someone who presents him or herself is actually present at the airport (TSA, n.d.).

US legislation had already put in the mandatory recording of biometrics from its visitors since 2001, which you might have encountered in practice yourself by the required fingerprinting and portrait picture at the border (OAG, 2022). This allowed the US government to have more information on those who visited the country (DHS, 2007). Closer to home, the Netherlands has also had eGates at the border control since 2014, which allows EU citizens to cross the border by an automated process where you only have to insert your passport and look into a camera. The digitized passport picture in newer biometric passports allows for facial recognition and comparison (BCD Travel, 2014).

These solutions speed up and secure processes at the airport a lot, but the systems also do record a lot of our personal information. For example, the exact number and timing of your border crossings are stored, and in order to make the facial recognition possible, a large amount of data points derived from your passport photo and the real time facial recognition scan are processed (Paterson, 2022). There are even reports of bias in facial recognition, possibly leading to secondary checks based on e.g., skin color and gender (LaDier, n.d.). These privacy concerns are important to keep in mind.

In 2018, Delta Airlines has launched a biometric terminal in Atlanta. It allows passengers who have provided their passport information ahead of their arrival to experience a fully touchless experience. For check-in, bag drop, security check, boarding, and passport control on return, they only need to scan their face at the designated checkpoints, no need for their passport at all (Steele, 2018). However, in addition to Detroit since 2019, these two airports remain the only ones to have facial recognition technology from curb to plane. Is there even sufficient demand for such technology?

Research has shown that the biometrics adoption rate in the air travel industry differ per process. For example, in the figure below it can be seen that the adoption rate is highest for the booking process and the lowest for boarding. Yet airlines and airports seem to push the application of biometrics specifically in the passport control and boarding processes (Efthymiou, 2021).

The use of biometrics has still a lot of potential in the dwell time process, it appears. This is the time between completing all the required checks and the boarding process (Efthymiou, 2021). The adoption rate is relatively high and at the time of writing, there are no innovations to be found there yet. Maybe you could even pay in the duty-free store by just looking at a payment terminal? There is still a lot to be improved and biometrics have a lot of potential in the air travel industry. I believe it will become a part of future air travel experience, as it has already demonstrated it can improve efficiency and security. I think the use of biometrics will also lay the foundation for travel with a digital passport, or possibly even without it.

References

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Safety by Design as a guiding principle for the future

9

October

2022

5/5 (2)

With a consistently growing number of new technologies that are being developed, we can argue that humankind will be capable of things even unimaginable to us now. For example, current technologies such as VR already enable us to improve the efficiency of workflows and AI is giving us tools to create art by simply typing a query. However, it is difficult to manage how people will make use of new technologies. There will always be people with malicious intent, unfortunately.

That is where Safety by Design (SbD) can come in as part of the solution. Safety by Design is a relatively new design principle where new inventions are designed from the start with user safety in mind. With SbD, safety is not only a small component but a prerequisite for the completion of the development process. This prevents unwanted behavior and outcomes (INHOPE, 2021). It forces more thought on possible uses and minimizes threats to users (World Economic Forum, n.d.). It fits in the larger concept of responsible innovation, which is centered on ethical acceptability, sustainability, and societal desirability, according to Von Schomberg (2013).

One example where Safety by design has been implemented is DALL-E 2. This creative AI system, based on GPT-3, has recently been released to the public in batches. However, it has disabled any functions with regard to the creation of unwanted output, such as violence, explicit content, or other of such topics, even before the tool was released (OpenAI, n.d.-a; OpenAI, n.d.-b). The developers behind DALL-E 2 have done extensive research on possible implications and possible uses their system has (Ahmad & Mischkin, 2022).

Safety by Design is already being applied in the development of physical products, and although rising in use, it is not as conventional in technology development (Perrino, 2022). Should it be applied more often by developers? As Safety by design does keep society safe from those with bad intentions, it does raise the question of where the border lies between freedom and belittlement. Who determines what is right or wrong, what constitutes as malicious behavior, and most importantly: will it stand in the way of innovation?

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